Ryan Craig Adapting Action Thriller TAKEDOWN for Warner Bros.

Warner Bros. has tapped writer/director Ryan Craig (Small Town Saturday Night) to adapt Brad Thor’s international action thriller novel Takedown. For those unfamiliar, Takedown is the fifth installment in a series of books that follow the adventures of Scot Harvath, a former Navy SEAL Team 6 member who goes on to become a counterterrorism agent – a position that undoubtedly finds him in all kinds of bullet-ridden/”end of civilization as we know it” type of scenarios.

More specifically, Takedown finds Harvath attempting to stop a terrorist who has attacked New York City over Fourth of July weekend. News of Craig’s hiring comes courtesy of Heat Vision. Per their report, Bill Gerber and Casey Wasserman will produce Takedown with hopes of turning it into a project of The Bourne Identity ilk (surprise, surprise). If you’d like to know a little more about the project, hit the jump for a synopsis of Thor’s book.

More terrorist-whupping kicks off Thor’s latest addition to his series (Blowback, etc.) featuring Scot Harvath, covert counter terrorism operative for the Department of Homeland Security. Harvath abducts an Algerian bomb-maker out of Montreal while another U.S. team snatches Mohammed bin Mohammed (a.k.a M&M), head of al-Qaeda’s weapons of mass destruction committee, from Somalia and stashes him in a secret facility in New York City. But Harvath’s premonition that the next terrorist attack would make “9/11 look like choir practice” comes true when Al-Qaeda operative Abdul Ali, backed by a three-foot-tall freelance intelligence agent known as “the Troll,” goes to New York to rescue M&M.

As part of the al-Qaeda rescue attempt, the Big Apple comes under furious attack. The U.S. president’s daughter is seriously injured and thousands are slain as Harvath and his team chase a ruthless enemy through the devastated streets and subways. Bullets fly, bombs explode and people die. Back in Washington, to the disgust of the president, cowardly bureaucrats mewl and whine. Despite stock characters and just-get-the-job-done writing, hawkish readers may relish the non-stop action, lethal weapons, flag waving platitudes and outrageous American-on-terrorist torture. Others may have no stomach for Thor’s vision of a U.S. that has dispensed with rule of law to deal with “bad guys…always probing for another soft spot they could exploit.”